We got up around our usual time and the house battery voltage was down to about 9.5 VDC — practically dead! The furnace had been running off and on through the night, and that drained the batteries more overnight. The Link 10 battery monitor display even shut down when we tried to turn on a ceiling light! We prepped the RV to move and I jumped the RV house batteries with the Jeep so we could bring in the slide. J left in the Jeep around 8:20 and I left in the RV around 8:25.

J ran some errands in Payson and ...

I went to the Peteetneet Museum in the old Peteetneet School around 9:05 to go online. Before shutting down the RV engine, I turned on the generator so that the house batteries would continue to get charged. I was looking for a place that would have a battery capacity tester. It puts a load on the battery and by measuring the voltage over time, it indicates the health of the battery.

I went to the WalMart in Payson around 9:50 to see if they had a battery capacity tester. They didn't have one but the guy recommended the Auto Zone on the other side of the parking lot.

I went to the Auto Zone in Payson around 10:00 and they had a battery capacity tester. I took all of the house batteries out of the battery box so that the batteries could be tested individually, then the guy tested them. He said they all appeared to be OK which was odd. It also lent a little more credibility to my theory that a battery or two might have a short through the battery box that was custom made for us. There were some rough spots where it was welded together, and one of the battery cases had been worn thin after rubbing on the rough spot of the weld for about two and a half years. So, before putting the batteries back, I called J to bring the Jeep over to Auto Zone. (She was at McDonald's charging her laptop and using their free Wi-Fi.) J arrived around 11:00 and I left in the Jeep around 11:05.

I went to Southgate Hardware, a Do It Best place in Payson, to get some aluminum angle-iron to line the battery tray to provide a smooth surface for the batteries to rest on. One of the workers cut it to length for me in a small back shop area. :)

I returned to the RV around 11:25 and reinstalled the batteries. I also added four layers of corrugated plastic tubing over the battery hold-down angle-iron to protect a set of wires that had been resting on top of it. Before I put the corrugated plastic tubing on the wires on Octover 6, 2010, those wires had been tied to the thick plastic handle of the battery to keep them off of the battery hold-down bar, but after putting the corrugated plastic tubing around the wires, the bundle was too thick to fit atop the battery handle.

I came inside the RV around 12:45 and had lunch that J made me. I thought about the battery problem, and came up with one more test that I could run before we left. I asked the guy at Auto Zone if we could plug in the RV while I continued to work on it, and he said sure and showed me an outside outlet that I could use. :) We moved the RV over near the building and plugged in around 1:25. That way, J could run her computer using the shore power while I worked on the RV battery system. The first thing I did was install my multimeter between the negative side of the battery bank and the shunt so I could measure the amperage to make sure that there weren't any shorts that would drain the battery without the Link 10 battery monitor knowing about it. (I was suspecting a problem with the Link 10 wiring itself because of the recent corrosion problems.) That side of the battery checked out OK, so I tested the amperage between the positive side of the battery bank and all of the leads going to it. That side checked out OK too. So, either there was no more problems and everything was fixed, or it was just a matter of time for an odd short or load somewhere to reappear and drain our batteries. After I put everything back together, we used the shore power to charge the house batteries while I cleaned up and we talked about where to go tonight. We unhooked from shore power then hooked up the Jeep to tow and got underway around 4:05 — another fun day working on the RV. :)

We headed south on I-15.

We stopped at the Tesoro in Nephi around 4:35 to top off both vehicles at $2.879/gal before heading back up into the mountains. I also installed a new set of NAPA winter wiper blades on the Jeep before we got underway around 4:45.

We took UT-132 east to Moroni and then US-89 north to Fairview. Then we took UT-31 east and up to Skyline Drive. We were pleasantly surprised to see that the aspens still hadn't reached peak.

We stopped around 6:00 and unhooked the Jeep near the summit at 9655 ft (2943m) and took the Jeep to go look for a good boondocking spot.

We settled on a nice spot, moved the RV there, then left in the Jeep to go photograph the sunset.

We had been drawn to the nice layers as were were looking for a boondocking spot, and the orange sky was a nice addition (below left). The image was created from one RAW file that I processed twice to bring out detail in the bright sky and dark foreground and then combined by hand in Photoshop. Right after the sun set over the distant mountains, the clouds turned a nice deep orange (below right). The contrast between the bright sky and dark foreground prompted me to take three exposures to capture detail throughout the scene and then I combined them by hand in Photoshop.


We returned to the RV and I tilted the solar-electric panels to get ready for tomorrow while J prepared dinner.

We had dinner around 7:47 of black bean burritos and fresh guacamole and chips. It was delicious!

After dinner, we turned on the generator for about 45 minutes to top off the batteries. I worked up a blog entry and did some things online through our fast Verizon Wireless Broadband Access signal. We each had a blueberry bar with vanilla ice cream for late dessert — mmm.